America in Italy examines the influence of the American political experience on the imagination of Italian political thinkers between the late eighteenth century and the unification of Italy in the 1860s. Axel Körner shows how Italian political thought was shaped by debates about the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution, but he focuses on the important distinction that while European interest in developments across the Atlantic was keen, this attention was not blind admiration. Rather, America became a sounding board for the critical assessment of societal changes at home.Many Italians did not think the United States had lessons to teach them and often concluded that life across the Atlantic was not just different but in many respects also objectionable. In America, utopia and dystopia seemed to live side by side, and Italian references to the United States were frequently in support of progressive or reactionary causes. Political thinkers including Cesare Balbo, Carlo Cattaneo, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Antonio Rosmini used the United States to shed light on the course of their nation's political resurgence. Concepts from Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Vico served to evaluate what Italians discovered about America. Ideas about American "domestic manners" were reflected and conveyed through works of ballet, literature, opera, and satire.Transcending boundaries between intellectual and cultural history, America in Italy is the first book-length examination of the influence of America's political formation on modern Italian political thought.

Preface xiA Note on References and Bibliography xvii
Introduction 1
A White Canvas 1
Where, When, and What Was America? 7
European Exchanges 9
Transatlantic Connections 13
America's Place on the Risorgimento's Map 16
Literary Tropes 25
Explaining America 31
Pamphlets, Not Muskets 37
Singing and Dancing America 40
1 America as History 42
Fratricide and Civil War 42
Histories and the Politics of Reception: Carlo Botta 46
History, Literature, and the "Erotics of Art" 56
Botta's Federalism of Nation-States 59
Transatlantic Botta 60
Carlo Giuseppe Londonio and the American Revolution 62
America and Universal History: Giuseppe Compagnoni 66
Historiography as Political Thought 73
2 Concepts in the Language of Politics 78
Political Ideas and National Character 78
Natural Rights and Constitutional Government 80
Luigi Angeloni and Jacobin Americanism 85
Representation in Transnational Perspective: Romagnosi and Balbo 87
Democratic Challenges and the Limits of Italian Anglophilia 93
Federalism 97
Gioberti's Federalism, or "Britain, the Sicily of Europe" 100
Rosmini and the Limits of American Democracy 103
Mazzini's Challenge: Democracy beyond the American Way 108
Democratic Diversions from Mazzini 112
3 A Model Republic? The United States in the Italian Revolutions of 1848 114
An Age of Constitutions: From 1820 to 1848 114
Carlo Cattaneo and the Revolution in Lombardy 121
Cattaneo's Understanding of American Democracy 130
Giuseppe Montanelli and Federal Democracy in Tuscany 138
Independence and Constitutional Models in Sicily 146
From Defeat to Annexation 160
4 Unveiling Modernity: Verdi's America and the Unification of Italy 163
Murder in Boston, Parma, and Paris 163
Un ballo and the Unification of Italy 167
Staging the New World 169
Un ballo, from Rome to the World 172
Reading Un ballo in maschera 175
Verdi's America 177
Turning Gustavo into Riccardo 185
Virgil in America 191
Verdi and "il suo tempo" 193
Lincoln's Un ballo 195
5 A War for Uncle Tom: Slavery and the American Civil War in Italy 199
"Of the Foul Blood of Negroes" 199
Slavery in Italian Political Thought 200
Slavery on Stage 206
Reading Uncle Tom 210
Italian Unification and the American Civil War 215
From Subject Nation to International Arbitrator 221
Conclusions 225
Notes 233
Bibliography 293
Index 333